Apocalypse now: race against time to fight off multiple ‘black swan’ events

These historic shocks are no longer isolated and require a major rethink in strategy

‘The walls are coming down between natural and human systems, with humans impacting nature at a global scale for the first time in history’

‘You have got to recognise that we have to move from a “just in time” economy to a “just in case” economy’

‘What’s the collective noun for black swans?”, asked an Oxford academic on Twitter last week, as gas prices hit record highs. “An apocalypse,” came the quick-fire reply.

Black Swan events, or what disaster planners call “long-tail” risks, are not supposed to come all at once. We think of them as isolated events that happen only once every hundred years or so. If we plan for them at all, we tend to deal with them one at a time.

Yet in the last year, the world has faced a multitude of “historic” shocks amid the worst pandemic since 1918. Locally, we face severe disruptions not just of gas and CO2 supplies, but of the labour and fuel needed to operate supermarkets, factories and farms.

In mid-summer, Britain was hit with a “level 3” extreme heat warning and a low-pressure system stalled across central Europe, bringing “once-in-amillennium” flooding to countries including Germany, France and Belgium. At the same time, the wildfire season sparked blazes in North America “larger than in previous history”. There have also been near misses. In January, it transpires, we may have been closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

According to Peril, a new book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, America’s highest-ranking general twice called his Chinese counterpart in the final months of the Trump administration to reassure him that the president had no plans to attack China, and that the United States was not collapsing, according to The New York Times.

“Things may look unsteady,” general Mark Milley told general Li Zuocheng of China on January 8, two days after Mr Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol Building. “But that’s the nature of democracy, general Li. We are 100 per cent steady. Everything’s fine.”

No sooner had the general put the phone down, he convened a meeting with top US commanders to remind them that the procedures for launching a nuclear strike called for his involvement, and could not simply be ordered by the president.

So how has it come to this? Why are so many Black Swan events coming at once? And what does it say about the UK’s emergency planning that we were not ready for them?

Bent Flyvbjerg, a fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, and expert on power and rationality in decision-making, says we are all prone to “Black Swan blindness”. “Our brains are not well suited for detecting extreme risks,” he says. Because we focus on the here and now and tend to discount the future, “your biggest risk is you”.

According to Prof Flyvbjerg, a key step in planning for Black Swan events is to embrace the fact they are not predictable. You can count on some, like pandemics and earthquakes, happening at some point but others will emerge completely out of the blue.

He compares a risk planner who does not see this to a casino owner who thinks he has everything covered: “The law of large numbers, that’s what works in a casino; you always know what the average winning score is going to be. And that’s why the casino can make money.

“But that’s not the Black Swan. That is what is predictable. A Back Swan event for the casino might be an earthquake that makes the building crumble. It’s random, that’s the difference”.

Prof Flyvbjerg and others say Black Swans are becoming more frequent as the world becomes more complex and interconnected. And, he adds, “the walls are coming down between natural and human systems, with humans impacting nature at a global scale for the first time in history”.

Worse, Black Swan events “regress to the tail” – meaning that no matter how extreme a Black Swan event is, a more extreme one will eventually occur.

The fact the sea wall at the Fukushima nuclear power station was only built high enough to protect against the previous worst tsunami is a classic example of planners not really understanding the maths of long-tail risks, says Prof Flyvbjerg. By the same token, Covid-19 will not be the worst pandemic we ever face.

As well as fooling themselves they have everything covered in their risk registers, planners also commonly make the mistake of “letting down one’s guard because a risk has not materialised for a while,” says

Prof Flyvbjerg.

The disbandment in July 2019 – just five months before Covid hit – of the UK National Security Committee’s subcommittee on “threats, hazards, risks and contingencies” is a strong example of this and was noted by the joint parliamentary committee on the national security strategy last week.

“We are seriously concerned by the apparent downgrading of risk management in central government. Risk management across government is loose, unstructured, and lacking in central oversight and accountability at both the ministerial and official level,” said the cross party committee in a scathing new report.

There are signs ministers realise the UK’s disaster planning is inadequate.

Next week, a consultation led by the Cabinet Office to draw up a new “National Resilience Strategy” will close, after gathering evidence from experts across the field.

“I think they recognise things need to improve – the problem is there isn’t a simple, cheap answer to this. You have got to recognise that we have to move from a ‘just in time’ economy to a ‘just in case’ economy,” says Lord Toby Harris, the Labour peer and resilience specialist.

Lord Harris jokes Black Swans were not the only risk Whitehall planners struggle with. There are Black Jellyfish with multiple tentacles which “go on longer than you expect and have a nasty sting in the tail”. Plus Black Elephants, “the thing nobody wants to talk about”, he says.

Lord Harris adds that there’s a domino effect with extreme events that is not properly accounted for. “There are 38 risks in the latest National Risk Register but they are all in siloes. What isn’t recognised is that one will trigger another,” he says. “There’s a cascading effect – no power means petrol pumps don’t work, ATMS don’t work, people run out of money.”

Experts stress that Black Swan events can and must be planned for, despite their apparent randomness.

“Prudent decision makers will not count on luck,” writes Prof Flyvbjerg.

“Instead, decision makers will want to do two things: (a) ‘cut the tail’, to reduce risk by mitigation, and (b) practise the precautionary principle.”

“Political short-termism” is a key problem of government risk scanning, adds Sam Hilton, a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University. “There’s a bias towards what’s knowable and expected,” says Mr Hilton.